Aptex strikes gold on the Web

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 12/29/97

Aptex Software, Inc., which bills itself as "The Content Mining Company," in two years has struck what any Internet start-up would consider to be the mother lode: seven straight quarters of profitability.

Michael Thiemann, Aptex's 41-year-old president and CEO, might have appeared an unlikely prospector back in late 1995. That's when he left the No. 2 spot at one of that year's most successful initial public offerings, HNC Software, Inc., to launch his new company. HNC, a maker of neural network software products, put up 80% of the stake that got Aptex started.

"We always felt that there was a huge market [HNC was] not addressing, and that was a market for [handling] data that doesn't fit into a numeric symbolic structure," Thiemann says. "That's most of what we deal with most of the time: text, symbols, numbers that aren't in tables . . . the everyday life of using Pcs."

Aptex now has two successful product lines, each of which uses neural network technology that "reads and understands unstructured text." Designed to help corporations transform that type of data into dollars, the products are:

Advertising server software called SelectCast that promises to increase click-through rates and pinpoint receptive audiences so commercial messages reach the right eyes.

Server-based software called SelectResponse that helps companies manage and process large volumes of e-mail that come into so-called alias Web site addresses - for example, webmaster@company.com or info@company.com.

Released in June, SelectResponse is the newer of the two products. And given that many companies are just now realizing the extent of their Web site e-mail problem, Select-Response may prove more strategic for Aptex in the long term.

One industry watcher believes 1998 will bring more good news for Aptex.

"Their approach using neural networks technology looks very strong," says Greg Etemad, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a Mountain View, Calif., market re-search and consulting firm. "It's a little more flexible and easier to use than the roles-based approaches that other companies are trying."

There is a consensus among industry watchers that products such as Aptex's are just now hitting the radar screens of corporations as they grapple with the onslaught of information generated by their Web sites.

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